GeForce GTX 650 Ti Graphics Cards Roundup. Page 4

Today we are going to review five entry level graphics cards that come at a very affordable price, including a reference design from Nvidia, GeForce GTX 650 Ti based proprietary products from ECGA, Gigabyte and Zotac, and Zotac GeForce GT 640. What does this price range have to offer to us these days? Let’s find out!

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB (GV-N65TOC-2GI)

Our graphics card roundups can but rarely do without Gigabyte products. The company is renowned for its original solutions with custom PCBs, increased clock rates and unique coolers. The new Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB is a good example.

The compact box isn’t really eye-catching but provides all important product-related information.

The card is safely wrapped into a soft antistatic pack. It is accompanied by a few accessories:

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti is manufactured in China and costs a little more than $170. Its warranty period is 2 years.

A glance over this product is enough to see that it’s not just a Gigabyte-branded copy of the reference GTX 650 Ti. It is as long as 249 mm although its PCB is 145 mm only, just like the PCBs of the two previous cards.

The face side of the PCB is covered by the WindForce 2X cooler which is about 40% longer than the PCB itself.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti offers an unusual selection of video interfaces including two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI and one D-Sub.

There’s also a vent grid in the card’s mounting bracket.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti has one 6-pin power connector facing up.

It may be less convenient than when the power connector faces back, but Gigabyte engineers had no other choice due to the employed cooler. The power requirements are identical to those of the reference sample: 110 watts for the graphics card and 400 watts for a computer containing it.

The PCB differs from the reference one in color only.

The 2+1-phase power system is managed by a UPi Semiconductor uP6210 controller. The graphics card belongs to the Ultra Durable 2 series which means that it features high-quality and exceptionally reliable components.

Its GPU was manufactured on the 34th week of 2012.

It is pre-overclocked to 1033 MHz (+11.3%). That’s quite a lot, even though not as high as the GPU clock rate of the EVGA card.

The memory chips are the same type as those of the Nvidia and EVGA cards discussed above, but the amount of memory is doubled to 2 gigabytes.

The memory frequency is, unfortunately, left at the standard level of 5400 MHz, so the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti specs only differ from the reference card’s in GPU clock rate and related parameters.

Besides the pre-overclocked GPU, the Gigabyte boasts an original cooler called WindForce 2X.

It consists of an aluminum heatsink with two copper pipes, 6 mm in diameter. The pipes are part of the cooler’s base and, judging by the thermal grease imprint, are ideally suited to contact the 221sq.mm GPU die.

The heatsink is made of thin aluminum plates press-fitted on the pipes with a spacing of 1 mm.

The heatsink is thin at about 10 mm, so the two 90mm PWM-regulated fans don’t find it difficult to blow the air through such densely placed fins. This is confirmed by our temperature test:

Auto fan mode

Maximum fan speed

As you can see, the WindForce 2X does its job very well: 47°C in the automatic regulation mode and only 43°C at the maximum speed of the two fans. That’s much better in comparison with the two previous graphics cards.

Despite the high-performance cooler, the card itself couldn’t show anything special in terms of overclocking potential. We could only increase its GPU clock rate by 45 MHz and its memory clock rate by 1760 MHz.

The resulting clock rates were 1078/7160 MHz:

Although the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti couldn’t impress us with its overclockability, its WindForce 2X cooler once again delivered outstanding performance, never letting the GPU get hotter than 50°C.

This refers to the automatic fan regulation mode when the fans only worked at 1680 RPM. The Gigabyte has no rivals in terms of GPU temperature among the graphics cards we’ve tested so far today.